Posted on 03/15/2011 6:36:48 PM PDT by JSteff
My wife was the closest pregnant civilian to TMI in Middletown PA when the event started she has a unique perspective on TMI, nuclear emergencies, Japan, and near melt downs.
Yet at this time she still does not see nuclear power as a bad thing!
My original post was not “hostile.” It was a statement of plain truth.
Our world is a toxic place. Radiation is everywhere. Toxins of all sorts that we can’t even imagine are everywhere—from the food we eat, to the cell phones we use, to the air we breathe, to the water we drink, et cetera.
I don’t take it “badly” that you take the FReeper “seniority” line to put me down; I just think it’s juvenile and does not help add to your argument (in which you still did not address my original question). It’s not a “problem” for me, but it does illustrate your (or her) touchiness.
I’ve read all the comments and I am wondering why she is your x-wife? God bless her and I hope she regains her health.
Churches have not been shown to cause cancer because (to my knowledge) no one has done a statistical study to question the hypothesis. In statistics, that doesn’t mean no such relation or causality exists, it merely means no one has studied it.
Back to TMI:
Show me a statistical study that has a result of a higher statistical incidence of cancers with statistically proven causality from radiation released by Three Mile Island during their event.
Well, there isn’t one, at least not one that wasn’t funded by plaintiffs suing the plant operator of TMI.
But let’s try something else, since it was recently in the news.
http://www.radiation.org/reading/pubs/091116Thyroidcancer.pdf
His hypothesis is that the mere proximity of people to nuclear reactors causes an increase in the statistical rate of thyroid cancers.
Let’s accept his conclusions for the sake of discussion, but I will NB there are errors of methodology in this paper. It is pretty glaring if you know something about statistics.
The studies which he’s critiquing found no statistical significant increase in cancer rates next to TMI.
Look at Table 1. First, NB that Pennsylvania is the state with the highest rate of thyroid cancer, bar none, in all 50 states. Why? I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know. I do know that it is pretty obvious that the worst states for cancer overall are in the northeast, which you can see here on a nice little map and nice table:
http://www.cancer-rates.info/naaccr/
You can spot a lot of interesting patterns if you play around with the database on that site.
But back to the paper above from “radiation.org”:
Of the top 11 states for incidence of thyroid cancer, which ones even have a nuclear power plant in the state, ie, that their population could be adjacent to?
Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware.
States that are in the top 11, but have no nuclear reactors: New Mexico, Utah, Montana, Nevada and Wyoming. I’m tossing Wyoming onto the list because the last three states in the top 11 all have the same rate/100K population. He numbers 9, 10 and 11 all as “9” - I think that’s a typo.
His thesis is that proximity to nuclear power plants increases the statistical rates for thyroid cancer. He cherry-picks counties to get there, but let’s go with his argument, which is that the eastern corridor of Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey have a rate of thyroid cancer that suggests proximity to a nuclear power plant increase thyroid cancer rates.
OK, then what about North and South Carolina? Why do they have among the very lowest incidences of thyroid cancer in the entire nation, and yet they have a very high concentration of reactors, especially if one lives in the northern counties of South Carolina? Not explained, he never tests his hypothesis against an interesting question. Again, he cherry-picked counties and doesn’t ask inconvenient questions. And for me, this is where the whole thing starts falling apart. He doesn’t test his hypothesis against data that he doesn’t cherry-pick.
The big flaw I mentioned above? He doesn’t control for when the plants were built, nor how long the cancer patients had been living in proximity to the plant. Radiation isn’t just about being exposed at all, it is also about how *long* you were exposed, ie, your dosage is ‘intensity over time.’ He’s claiming a dosage from living in mere proximity to said plants, therefore he has to actually settle the issue as to how long the person has been exposed to the plant. He doesn’t.
But I’m showing you this paper because it supports your position. It gets there by cherry picking and other flaws of methodology, but it does support your position, *in general*.
Sadly, he then cuts down your TMI issue later in the paper, on p. 5:
“5. Three Mile Island. Another source of exposure to radioactive iodine, especially in the northeast U.S. is airborne emissions from the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island plant. Official reports estimated 14.2 curies of I-131 and particulates were released into the environment, (31) and prevailing winds carried the radioactivity hundreds of miles to the east and northeast. (32-33) But the 2001-2005 thyroid cancer rate Dauphin County PA, where the reactor is located, had a rate of 12.0, lower than many other counties in the state. Again, while 1979 Three Mile Island emissions may play a factor in subsequent thyroid cancer state and county, these data suggest it is not a major contributor.”
Read all the issues on p10. Pretty interesting, in light of the amount of I-131 generated in nuke weapon testing, IMO.
Now, he mentioned the SEER. Here, I’ll source that for you too:
http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2006/results_merged/sect_26_thyroid.pdf
If you’re a nerd for numbers, there’s all manner of interesting data there. But since pictures tell stories faster, scroll down to Figure 26.1 (you’ll see the figures labeled vertically on the right margin). NB the incidence for white females. Why do blacks have a lower incidence overall, and why do white females have about twice the incidence of white males, even before TMI. Before a lot of reactors were even in operation, white women had an incidence 2X that of white men.
No explanation given or explored (to my knowledge) in any of the reports on thyroid cancer and power plant radiation.
BTW - google this author’s name. I’m picking a source for your argument who, one could say, has an agenda. But I’ll leave you to discover that.
Now here’s some of the statistical and epidemiological studies that could not find a statistical correlation of cancer rates to the TMI incidence:
1. American Journal of Public Health, Hatch-Susser study, 1990.
Summary:
“In an analysis examining cancer rates and residential proximity to the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, we observed a modest postaccident increase in cancer near TMI that is unlikely to be explained by radiation emissions. The increase resulted from a small wave of excess cancers in 1982, three years after the 1979 accident. Such a pattern might reflect the impact of accident stress on cancer progression. Our study lacked a direct, individual measure of stress, however, The most plausible alternative explanation is that improved surveillance of cancer near the TMI plant led to the observed increase.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1405170/pdf/amjph00206-0049.pdf
But this report was not without some controversy, especially when it came court time.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1469835/pdf/envhper00314-0052.pdf
Here’s a little back-n-forth spat:
Wing, epidemiologist for the plaintiffs:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470076/?page=1
And Susser’s response to Wang’s letter:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1470087/?page=1
Just as in global warming, politics and money can pollute science. You choose who to believe. Oh, and if you’re wondering: Yes, statistical epidemiological studies can be “cooked.” Statistics is a branch of mathematics where engineers and scientists like to say “If you torture the data long enough, they will confess to almost anything.”
2. National Cancer Institute, 1990, 1991.
NCI’s studies found no statistical linkage. Here’s a summary of their findings:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/nuclear-facilities
3. OK, so what about I-131 from nuclear weapons? Hell, even tests on the other side of the planet generated interesting levels of I-131. eg, Tsar Bomba, 1961, a test by our new buddies, the Russkies. Ivan lit off the biggest above-ground test in world history, 51 MEGA-tons of yield. The Russkies had been planning on setting it up for 100 Mt of yield, but hey, they weren’t heartless. They supposedly worried about fallout, so they dialed it back to 51 Mt yield. That was nice of them, don’t you think?
Well, no statistical coupling between our own above-ground nuke tests and thyroid cancer could be found:
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=6283#toc
From the NCI’s legislative testimony in the 90’s:
http://legislative.cancer.gov/files/testimony-1997-10-01.pdf
“Thus far, studies of exposure to I-131 for medical purposes or from fallout in areas downwind from the site of atomic bomb tests during the 1950s have not produced conclusive evidence that such exposure to I-131 is linked to cancer. In 1992, the University of Utah reported a statistically significant dose-response relationship between exposure to radioiodines and occurrence of thyroid neoplasms (combined benign and cancerous tumors) in a group of nearly 2500 children in Utah, Nevada and Arizona who had been examined in the 1960s and again in the 1980s. However, while the correlation between the I-131 radiation dose and thyroid cancers alone was suggestive, it was not statistically significant and therefore could have been due to chance. “
Something that this testimony brings to light is the absurd levels of radiation used on children in the 50’s for seemingly silly ailments. Irradiation of a child for ringworm of the scalp? WTF? I might not be all that excited about radiation from a burning power plant in Japan, (or in Pennsylvania when I was a kid, or the Nevada Test Site fallout), but would I expose a kid to those levels of radiation to treat fungus? No.
5. What about other cancers?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1638153/?page=1
“In conclusion, the mortality surveillance of this cohort to date does not provide consistent evidence that low-dose radiation releases during the TMI accident had any measureable impact on the mortality experience.”
5. Now, want to see something interesting? Thyroid cancer rates in France, where they have a socialized medical system that generates cleaner stats (because there’s a central repository of health information) and... women have THREE times the incidence of thyroid cancer of men:
http://www.eje-online.org/cgi/content/full/160/1/71
They too experienced a rise in cancer rates through the 90’s, which are now seen to be leveling off.
They’re pretty far away from TMI, yes? And an ocean away from the NTS. And they have rates of thyroid cancer on par with ours (for females).
Lastly, do I pooh-pooh all forms of radiological exposure? Hell no. What do I worry about? Radon.
There is now strong statistical evidence that a significant proportion of lung cancers occurring in NON-smokers are caused by living in a house with elevated levels of radon gas.
Seeing as how our area of Wyoming has an elevated rate of radon detected in homes (> 60% of homes tested test above the 4.0 pCi/L recommended limit, and our average level of radon in untreated homes is over 6 pCi/L), and the rate of mortality for lung cancers is higher than mortality for thyroid cancers, you can bet your buttocks that we have a radon evac system on this house.
Why?
There’s sound statistical reasons that support doing so:
http://www.uihealthcare.com/news/news/2005/03/21radon.html
http://enhs.umn.edu/hazards/hazardssite/radon/radonriskassessment.html
The level of radon in the soil here is high, it is high in most houses in the county, it is high enough that the stats clearly show raised incidences of lung cancer in non-smokers. In areas where radon is high, it is likely to comprise a huge chunk of your normal background radiation exposure; some people put the contribution of radon to Americans’ background radiation exposure as half or more.
I go where the numbers lead me. The numbers tell me to be concerned about radon, and not at all concerned about I-131 from a reactor clear around the world.
All three of those kids who died of brain tumors were also students at Penn State. At least four other kids who lived in the immediate area have since died of other cancers. That has to be above average cancer rates.
Thanks for the reply. I was very aware of TMI at the time. I just could not remember if there was a record of contaminated air/water being vented into the atmosphere from the plant.
If you see a link to the interview I’d be interested in reading it - please ping me.
Thanks.
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